An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter — the disease's highest death toll in at least four decades.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday night with The Associated Press.

Flu experts knew it was a very bad season, but at least one found size of the estimate surprising.

"That's huge," said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert. The tally was nearly twice as much as what health officials previously considered a bad year, he said.

Comment: 80,000 dead for the 2018 winter flu and no one hardly batted an eye. This should make it more than obvious how the masses are told how to think and react to given situations. For those who have even a minute ability to think for themselves, it is more than apparent that things do not add up for COVID-1984.

Comment: Note the date this article was published. Could these have been Covid-19 cases? They apparently weren't testing, so we may never know, but the US joins the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Iran and Israel in reporting 'early', 'many' and/or 'strange' 'flu cases' back in December last year... concurrent with the Wuhan outbreak. I.e, it's already been and gone, so all of this lockdown malarkey is thoroughly useless.

The U.S. winter flu season is off to its earliest start in more than 15 years.

An early barrage of illness in the South has begun to spread more broadly, and there's a decent chance flu season could peak much earlier than normal, health officials say.

The last flu season to rev up this early was in 2003-2004 — a bad one. Some experts think the early start may mean a lot of suffering is in store, but others say it's too early to tell.

"It really depends on what viruses are circulating. There's not a predictable trend as far as if it's early it's going to be more severe, or later, less severe," said Scott Epperson, who tracks flu-like illnesses for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

South Korea's Center for Disease Control has reassuring news about people with COVID-19 who test positive for the coronavirus weeks after their symptoms have resolved.

Health officials there studied 285 patients who tested negative for the virus after recovering, but weeks later tested positive again. The question — in this and similar situations — is whether a positive test in this circumstance means that these people can still spread the virus.

To find out, the scientists followed up with nearly 800 of those people's personal contacts, such as family members. They found no evidence that they had contracted the virus from the people who had a fresh positive result. The scientists also tried to grow the virus in secretions from these patients. They could not.

There are many medical uncertainties swirling around the COVID-19 story, but one widely accepted observation has been that children are among the least affected, both in number and symptom severity. At least until recently. In the United Kingdom, elsewhere in Europe and in a handful of locations in the U.S. (including New York, New Haven, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area), reports are surfacing of a pediatric inflammatory syndrome that many are rushing to blame on COVID-19. New York State has attributed the deaths of up to five children to the mystery ailment that, in some cases, has resulted in multisystem organ failure.

The potpourri of symptoms "striking newborns and teenagers alike" has prompted clinicians to draw comparisons to the rare childhood inflammatory condition called Kawasaki disease (KD) as well as to toxic shock syndrome (a condition resulting from poisoning by bacterial toxins). Years before COVID-19 came on the scene, the CDC estimated that about 5,450 children, primarily under age five, are hospitalized for KD each year in the U.S. — the equivalent of about 15 every day. While rare compared to other childhood diseases, KD attracts concern as the leading cause of pediatric acquired coronary artery disease, with life-threatening aneurysms being a possible outcome.

For those of you still wiping down groceries and other packages amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, breathe a sigh of relief: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now says the novel virus "does not spread easily" from "touching surfaces or objects" — but experts warn that doesn't mean it's no longer necessary to take "practical and realistic" precautions in stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Though it's not exactly clear when, the federal health agency appears to have recently changed its guidelines from early March that simply said it "may be possible" to spread the virus from contaminated surfaces. The CDC now includes "surfaces or objects" under a section that details ways in which the coronavirus does not readily transmit.

Other ways in which the virus does not easily spread is from animals to people, or from people to animals, the federal agency said on its updated page.

Comment: It seems they're dialing back the hysteria, but only a little. There is significant evidence, from actual reputable scientists, that the best course of action would be for the virus to spread amongst the population leading to herd immunity. Protect the vulnerable, of course (as you would for the flu, or any other easily transmissible disease), but for the rest, let it spread throughout the population normally. Most won't even notice they've got it, while their bodies build up natural immunity.

A Chinese laboratory has been developing a drug it believes has the power to bring the coronavirus pandemic to a halt. The outbreak was first reported in China late last year before spreading across the world, prompting an international race to produce treatments and vaccines.

A drug being tested by scientists at China's Peking University could not only shorten the recovery time for those infected but even offer short-term immunity from the virus, researchers say. Sunney Xie, director of the university's Beijing Advanced Innovation Centre for Genomics, told AFP that the drug has been successful at the animal testing stage.

"When we injected neutralizing antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500. That means this potential drug has (a) therapeutic effect."

The drug uses neutralizing antibodies, produced by the human immune system to prevent the virus infecting cells, which Mr. Xie's team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.

A clinical trial for a drug with the potential to treat one of the symptoms of the illness caused by the new coronavirus (Covid-19) will begin in Belgium on Wednesday. French biotechnology company Biophytis got the green light from the Federal Agency for Medicines and Health Products in Belgium to test their medicine Sarconeos.

Administered orally, Sarconeos is a molecule the company is developing to treat neuromuscular disease and which they said has the potential to treat breathing difficulties in Covid-19 patients.The trial will focus on the drug's potential to treat acute respiratory failure associated with the disease and will be carried out on a reduced pool of about 50 patients suffering from Covid-19.

"Our product has an effect on all muscles, including respiratory muscles, because it acts on an endocrinal system that controls cardio-respiratory function," Biophytis CEO Stanislas Veillet told Le Soir.

Veillet said that the spread of the epidemic in Italy had confirmed to medical experts that the virus attacked this system's cell receptors, which he said was exactly where the drug acts. "It could, therefore, have the potential to counterbalance this viral attack that results in respiratory distress."

By protecting respiratory function, the drug could result in patients either no longer needing oxygen therapy or in helping them make the most out of it, and it would also help avoid lesions resulting from patients' intubation.

In Belgium, the study will last 28 days and will be coordinated by Dr Muriel Lins, a pulmonologist at the AZ Sint-Maarten hospital in Mechelen.

The drug's use on the pool of 50 patients will randomised and include the use of placebos, and the results of the patients treated with Sarconeos will later be compared with a larger pool of 180 Covid-19 patients.

The results of the study will be reviewed by an independent committee tasked with deciding whether to give the go-ahead to larger clinical trials for the drug.

More and more frequently, government officials, political pundits and self-appointed "global health experts" like billionaire Bill Gates have been instructing the public that mass gatherings and any semblance of "normalcy" will not return until a vaccine for the novel coronavirus Covid-19 is created and subsequently distributed to the masses. In recent weeks, it has quickly become apparent that the leading Covid-19 vaccine candidate is the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine being developed by Boston-based Moderna Inc.

Today, Moderna announced that its vaccine candidate, named mRNA-1273, "appeared to produce an immune response in eight people who received it." Moderna's response is odd given that the "study" in question is focused on safety and "is actually not designed to measure effectiveness of the vaccine," according to a report in TIME. Notably, none of the study's findings on vaccine safety were reported aside from claims it was "generally safe." It is also worth noting that this "safety-focused" study only began in March and thus, to date, represents only an examination of the vaccine's effects in the very short term.

The argument that vitamin D deficiency may contribute to more severe cases of Covid is gaining ground. It is now reaching the point where it is surprising that we are not hearing from leading medical officials and politicians that people should consider taking supplements to ensure they have sufficient vitamin D.

This is not the same as arguing that vitamin D is a magic bullet that will cure the disease. Vitamins are not medication, the taking of which will have positive effects on everybody. They are top-ups: things that hurt you when you don't have enough of them in your system but do no extra good when you have enough. Indeed, with many vitamins, including D, taking too much can be toxic.

However, it is true that many people are deficient in vitamin D, especially at the end of winter. That is because, uniquely, vitamin D is a substance manufactured by ultraviolet light falling on your skin. You can get some from fish and other foods, but not usually enough. So most people's vitamin D levels fall to a low point in February or March when the sun has been weak and its UV output especially so. Public health bodies have long advised people to supplement vitamin D in winter anyway.

In a letter to Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) presents a frequently updated table of studies that report results of treating COVID-19 with the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ, Plaquenil®).

To date, the total number of reported patients treated with HCQ, with or without zinc and the widely used antibiotic azithromycin, is 2,333, writes AAPS, in observational data from China, France, South Korea, Algeria, and the U.S. Of these, 2,137 or 91.6 percent improved clinically. There were 63 deaths, all but 11 in a single retrospective report from the Veterans Administration where the patients were severely ill.

The antiviral properties of these drugs have been studied since 2003. Particularly when combined with zinc, they hinder viral entry into cells and inhibit replication. They may also prevent overreaction by the immune system, which causes the cytokine storm responsible for much of the damage in severe cases, explains AAPS. HCQ is often very helpful in treating autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.